Test Your Knowledge of Peter Gabriel's 'Sledgehammer'

Peter Gabriel's hit song "Sledgehammer" was his biggest international hit, combining his world-music sensibilities and love of experimentation with producer Daniel Lanois' own ambient leanings to create a stone-cold classic. The track was recorded in Gabriel's home studio, Ashcombe House, which was located within the long, rectangular cow shed of a converted farmhouse. The 56-input SSL 4000 E Series was complemented by a stock Studer A80 24-track machine and a modified Studio A80 with customized Colin Broad Audio cards. Outboard gear included an EMT echo plate, AMS 1580 digital delay, RMX 16, Delta Labs DL2, Lexicon 224, Quantec Room Simulator and Decca compressors, as well as Revox B77 quarter-inch and Ampex ATR half-inch tape machines. Gabriel's keyboards were either DI'd or they went through a PA stack in the live room, recorded with Neumann U87 room mics. The drums, bass, guitar and keyboards had been recorded in their most basic form, and the track's signature sound came from the combination of instruments to create a new part. Gabriel's original demos of his songs had consisted of a Linn 9000 drum pattern and chord progressions on the Prophet 5 or CP70, and these had been played back on the B machine while the A machine was used to simultaneously record the band and a rough mix of the demoed parts for reference on playback. The synchronizer was sending the wrong pulses to the modified machine, and the Studer A80 was notoriously inconsistent in terms of its tape speed for the first and last two minutes of each reel. There were six different reels because they did so many takes and there were great parts on all of them, so they had to devise a process to get parts back in sync onto a master reel. The solution was to rent and fly the Mitsubishi 32-track from New York over to England, creating a brand new digital master and preserving the quality of the analogue reels without having to degrade via multiple passes.This article talks about the making of Peter Gabriel's hit song "Sledgehammer". The song was recorded in 1985 at Real World Studios in Wiltshire, UK. The article highlights the challenges they faced while recording, including syncing multitrack edits, vocal recordings, and microphone selection. The article also mentions that the song was well-received by the Virgin and Geffen executives, who visited the studio to preview the album's tracks.